Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of multimedia data and large-scale image/video datasets readily available on the Internet. Among various web images on virtually any topic, images of persons (i.e., celebrities, historical figures, athletes, etc.) including portraits, posters, movie snapshots and news images are of particular interests to end-users. The fact that person-related queries constantly rank the highest among all the image queries clearly reveals the intensive user interests for images of persons. However, organizing images of persons on the Internet still remains a challenge to researchers in the multimedia community.
Among the challenges to organizing images of persons is identifying a name (or other information, e.g., birth date, occupation, etc.) of a person in an image. Currently, there exists no large-scale, searchable, person profile database. Manual annotation and organization of images represents a very labor intensive and time consuming task.